Liberatory

What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.

There is an obvious way to build this lens and it is wrong. The obvious way is to collect the good believers: the peaceful ones, the interfaith ones, the ones who make the room comfortable, and to imply that the problem is a few extremists who have hijacked otherwise fine traditions. That is the liberal answer and this theme’s whole argument is against it. None of these movements is a hijacking. Each is a real thing that real traditions produced under real conditions, and the people in this lens are not the nice wing of anything. They are people who looked at what their own tradition was doing and refused, at cost, from inside.

Ambedkar is the limit case and should be read as such: he concluded that his religion could not be reformed because supremacy was not a growth on it but its skeleton, and he left, and took half a million people with him. Nobody else here goes that far. The lens is the argument between his answer and the others.

Anchor questions

• Is the problem a few extremists, or a thing the tradition can produce whenever the conditions return? What follows from each answer?
• Ambedkar said reform was impossible and left. Was he right, and what does it cost to be right about that?
• Butler says the tools for criticizing Zionism are inside Jewish thought. Does that make the criticism more legitimate, or is that a question nobody should have to answer?
• Palestinian Christians have asked the churches to act since 2009. What does it mean that the Christians with the most power on this issue are the ones furthest away?
• Achcar refuses to treat Islamists as either allies or fascists. Is there a third position, and what is it?
• Teltumbde says victimhood politics can replace analysis. Is he describing anyone in this room?
• What would it take for the boundary to stop being the point? Has that ever happened anywhere?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise.

The Jewish argument, which is older than the state

Everything here is Jews arguing with Jews. That is the point, and if this lens is cut for time the theme should be cut instead.

• Yakov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within (2006). A century of Jewish opposition to Zionism, much of it religious, most of it older than Israel, by an Orthodox historian. The corrective to the idea that Jewish anti-Zionism is new, secular, or marginal. Paywalled: fernwoodpublishing.ca
• Judith Butler, Parting Ways (2012). The resources for criticizing Zionism are inside Jewish thought: diaspora, exile, the obligation to the stranger, read through Arendt and Levinas and Buber. Not a departure from Jewishness, an argument within it. Paywalled: cup.columbia.edu
• Shaul Magid, The Necessity of Exile (2023). Exile is not a wound Judaism needed a state to heal; it is a condition Judaism thought with, and sovereignty may have cost more than it bought. Magid is an ordained rabbi, which matters for how the argument lands. Paywalled: ayinpress.org
• On an Emerging Diasporism (Jewish Currents). Doikayt, the Bund’s word, hereness, coming back a century later for a generation that will not take the terms it was handed. Read it directly after the Bund in the historical lens and watch a dead argument stand up. Free: jewishcurrents.org
• Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. The two largest organized expressions, and not the same: JVP is anti-Zionist and organizes outside Jewish institutional life, IfNotNow organizes against the occupation from inside it. Distinguish them rather than blurring them into “Jewish critics.” Free: jewishvoiceforpeace.org, ifnotnowmovement.org

The Christian answer to Christian Zionism, from Christians who live there

• Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth (2009). Palestinian Christians, on the model of South Africa’s Kairos document, calling the occupation a sin and asking the world’s churches to act. The uncomfortable fact this document carries: the Christians with the most influence over Palestine are in Texas and Kentucky, and the Christians living in Palestine have been asking them to stop for fifteen years. Free: oikoumene.org

The Muslim refusal, on Islam’s own terms and on the left’s

• Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft (2005). An Islamic legal scholar arguing the extremists stole the tradition, and arguing it as a religious claim on religious grounds rather than as reassurance aimed at a Western audience. Paywalled: harpercollins.com
• Sadik Jalal al-Azm, Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse (1981). The secular Arab left refusing Islamism and refusing the idea that resistance means accepting the categories the West handed you. Al-Azm was prosecuted in Syria for what he wrote. Free: libcom.org
• Gilbert Achcar, Islamic Fundamentalism, the Arab Spring, and the Left. The hard question for this school’s own readers: how should a left relate to Islamist movements? Not as anti-imperialist allies, not as simply fascists. Achcar has spent a career refusing both, and this is where a room that thinks it already knows will find out it does not. Free: isreview.org

Ambedkar, and the furthest anyone goes

• B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936). Read this last. Ambedkar looked at his own religion, concluded that supremacy was not a deviation from it but its architecture, that reform was therefore not possible, and left, converting to Buddhism in 1956 with half a million people. He also wrote India’s constitution. He is not the nice wing of anything; he is what it looks like when someone takes this theme’s argument all the way. Free: ccnmtl.columbia.edu
• Anand Teltumbde, The Victimhood of Dalits (2020). And then the argument against Ambedkar’s inheritors, from the Dalit left: identity-based victimhood can quietly replace analysis, and caste is material before it is religious. Teltumbde was imprisoned under India’s anti-terror law while this was being written. Free: india-seminar.com
• Ratna Kapoor, Shaheen Bagh (2022). What refusal looked like when it worked: Muslim women holding a Delhi road for a hundred days, reading the constitution aloud, against a law making religion a test of citizenship. Then ask what happened afterward, because the answer matters. Free: frontiersin.org

Buddhism, and the refusal that is mostly missing

Read the honest version of this section before the sources: it is the thinnest in the lens, and the reason is worth more than the material.

• Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya (2014). A Burman Buddhist calling his own majority genocidal, in print, three years before the clearances, when Myanmar was still being written up as a democratic success story and Aung San Suu Kyi was still a saint. He was told he was overstating it. In 2018 the UN said what he had said. This is the hardest place to stand in this whole theme: not refusing a movement that is already condemned, but refusing one while everyone around you is applauding. Free: digitalcommons.law.uw.edu
• The Broken Palmyra (Hoole, Somasundaram, Sritharan, Thiranagama, 1990). Not Buddhist, and that is why it is here. Jaffna Tamil academics refused both nationalisms, documenting the state’s atrocities and the LTTE’s with the same unflinching hand, and gave the book away. Rajani Thiranagama was murdered by the LTTE in 1989 for co-writing it. Ambedkar’s standard, met by people the border was drawn against, who then refused their own side’s version of it. Free, via Wayback: web.archive.org

And now the gap, which is the actual finding. This school went looking for Buddhist monastic refusal of Buddhist nationalism, from inside the sangha, in free English, and did not find it. The monks who sheltered Muslims during the riots in Meiktila and Aluthgama exist and are named in passing in reporting; their own accounts are not published anywhere a study circle can reach. Every other tradition in this theme has an organized, self-published refusal: Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have websites, Kairos Palestine has a document, Ambedkar has a canon, and Abou El Fadl has a publisher. The Buddhist refusal has no equivalent in free English, and the two strongest voices here are a layman and a group of Tamils. Do not paper over that with an interfaith press release. Ask the room why the tradition Western readers consider the most peaceful is the one whose internal dissent is the hardest to read.

Debates and disagreements

The school holds these open.

• Reform or exit. Butler, Magid, Rabkin, and Abou El Fadl all say the tradition contains its own answer, and that the fight is for the tradition. Ambedkar says that is a comfort, that the supremacy is structural, and that the only honest move is out. Both positions are held by serious people who paid for holding them. Notice that Ambedkar is the only one who tested his by leaving.
• How a left should treat Islamism. Achcar against both easy answers. This is the disagreement most likely to be live in the room, because a school with this school’s politics will contain people who think any anti-imperialist force deserves solidarity and people who think that is how the left ends up defending clerics. Neither wins here.
• Whether religion is even the right frame. Teltumbde says the Hindutva case is material and that religious framing hides the economics. Kruse’s evidence in the theoretical lens cuts the same way from the American end: business paid for the preaching. If they are both right, this theme is a subsection of the capitalism theme. That possibility should be on the table, in the room, and not answered by the person who built the theme.
• Who is allowed to make the argument. Butler’s position rests partly on being Jewish. Abou El Fadl’s rests partly on being an Islamic jurist. Ambedkar’s rests on being Dalit. That is real, and it is also the mechanism this whole theme studies: the boundary deciding who may speak. Sit with that rather than resolving it.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Named gaps, and they are serious. There is no refusal from inside American Christian nationalism here at all: no ex-evangelical voice, nothing from the churches that split over this, nothing from the Southern Baptists who left. That is the largest hole in the theme, since it is the formation closest to most of this school’s readers. There is no ex-Islamist voice, and the genre is dominated by people who converted into careers as professional witnesses, which is why nothing here was proposed rather than something bad being included. Nothing from Israeli refuseniks or Israeli civil society. And the Buddhist refusal is barely here, which is documented above rather than hidden: no monastic voice, nothing from the monks who sheltered Muslims during the riots, and no Buddhist equivalent of JVP or Kairos Palestine that publishes itself in English. Sulak Sivaraksa and the engaged-Buddhist network were searched for and not verified in time, and are the most likely thing to fill this. Contributions welcome, and these most of all.